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SEO-Experts help answer my newbie questions!

Hello! Thanks for coming to my rescue; I really appreciate it. I am a newbie at SEO and I still haven't got the full picture of everything in my mind that covers linkbuiling, on page optimization, domain names, website creating, etc. I've really pretty much all the available guides on WarriorForum and BHW without much help on the topics above since most of the information was either provided by some person who didn't know what they were talking about, the information was outdated, or I didn't know what they meant.

I have so many questions that I hope some SEO-Expert could answer my newbie questions so that I won't get penalized for my two sites that I currently own. One of them was slapped by Yahoo!, Bing, AOL, and most other search engines with the exception of Google (It's only a matter of time of course). The other site I own is in the making currently without much on-page optimization.

Before I start doing some on-page depletion t to my two sites so they both get de-indexed and such because of keyword stuffing, fail link building, and other factors, I wanted to cover the problems I currently have about SEO and this site.

1) Using the SEO-MOZ 'keyword analysis tool', what is the ideal percentage difficulty a newbie like me could take easily with just a few links here and there including 5 posts/pages of great content? (I usually only write 5 posts that cover 500+ words each).

2) Do I need hosting to become successful or to get more on-page optimization for my websites? I currently use Go-Daddy forwarding with masking so that when my site shows up in google the content comes from blogger.

3) What is "Self Cannibalization"? I ALWAYS get that error for both my sites when I use the 'on page optimzation tool' from SEO-MOZ.

4) Using Blogger, What exactly are labels and does using this add any SEO value to my website?

5) I've read so many damn articles about ALT text and Title text for blogger; nothing explained what I put in it though. What am I supposed to put in it that will help me with my on page optimization? (Stuff like do I use spaces or dashes, do I put my keyword in there, how many characters should I not exceed, do I put one word or two words?)

6) On my website, I 'accidentally' didn't know that copy and pasting images from paint straight to blogger would be a bad idea because in the html I saw it was f'ed up because there was literally random characters everywhere for the file name. Since my site is a tutorial site, I have over 50+ images in all my posts combined that I've copied and pasted from paint.exe to the Blogger post. Should I reupload all of them to blogger or keep it the way it is? Will I be penalized for this or nothing would happen? Is there a benefit to fixing it?

7) For a new website that is less than 1 week old, when can I start building backlinks? If I can start building backlinks now, what is the ideal number per day that I should create?

8) Does post every single page or post of content I have on my website to other Web 2.0s like Squidoo, Wordpress, or Blog penalize my website for duplicate content or what? If I do this, does it give me any SEO benefit?

9) How much stronger is a .gov backlink than a .edu backlink? How much stronger are both of those compared to a regular extension backlink?

10) If I am building backlinks, should I link just my main home page URL or all internal URLs to?

11) I see several people that build backlinks to other websites by typing in a comment and throwing their link in there. Like question 10, should I post ALL the links to my website (Internal + Home) or just my main page link?

12) What is better; .com, .net, or .org? What about .info, .us, and .biz in terms of SEO benefit?

13) I have several pages on my site in which Google indexed them and I deleted the post. Now when I search my site on Google and I click on the link to the post, it is pretty much a 'dead link' because the post cannot be found. Does this harm my site in any way, and how can I take these dead pages off?

14) One of my sites is already indexed by Google but not Yahoo! What should I do to get my site indexed? It's already been about a week.

Thanks for attempting to answers my questions. I don't have anything to give, but, I can choose 3 'good answers' for helping me!

- going forward hold off on marking a "good answer" until you are truly satisfied. You can offer a thumbs up in the meantime and later mark the answer as good if it contributed to your satisfaction.

- it is perfectly fine to ask a few questions at once but 14 questions is really too much to ask at once imo. I would recommend asking your top 1 or 2 or perhaps 3 questions and saving the others for another day.

- Please try the site's SEARCH function in the upper-right corner. Many of your questions have been answered in detail on this site.

I will grab a few questions you asked and respond to them:

9) How much stronger is a .gov backlink than a .edu backlink? How much stronger are both of those compared to a regular extension backlink?

Absolutely zero. The TLD of a link has no weight in determining the link's value. It is a myth. With that said, an .edu or .gov link's value comes from its source. Generally speaking government or college/university websites have greater value then average sites.

10) If I am building backlinks, should I link just my main home page URL or all internal URLs to?

You should EARN links, not build them. Ideally you will earn links to pages throughout your site, not just the home page.

11) I see several people that build backlinks to other websites by typing in a comment and throwing their link in there. Like question 10, should I post ALL the links to my website (Internal + Home) or just my main page link?

Be very careful with this method. If you are building authentic links via a "good" blog site, that is fine. For example, if I were to throw in a link to my company site in this response, it would be ok. Why? SEOmoz is the world's #1 site for SEO information in terms of traffic (Alexa rank in the 300s). This Q&A is very well moderated and contains no spam. The information being provided in this response is (hopefully) thorough, accurate and helpful. In other words, this is an authentic response and not simply a means to generate a link to manipulate search rankings.

12) What is better; .com, .net, or .org? What about .info, .us, and .biz in terms of SEO benefit?

See the response to #9. Search engines do not value any TLD over the other. With that understood, users clearly favor .com so it is strongly preferred. A .net or .org URL can work very well under the right circumstances. For example, notice SEOmoz owns the .com and .org but they choose to use the .org site which goes well with their image as a community site.

13) I have several pages on my site in which Google indexed them and I deleted the post. Now when I search my site on Google and I click on the link to the post, it is pretty much a 'dead link' because the post cannot be found. Does this harm my site in any way, and how can I take these dead pages off?

First, make sure your site's 404 page is helpful. It is desirable to offer your site's normal navigation, a search option and a general "we are sorry, the page you are trying to reach is no longer available" type of message. If you have any content on your site that is very similar to the old page, provide a 301 redirect to the new page. If you deleted a page on 2011-best-christmas-gifts and you have a 2012 version of the page, you can redirect the old page to the new one.

14) One of my sites is already indexed by Google but not Yahoo! What should I do to get my site indexed? It's already been about a week.

First, register your site with Bing Webmaster Tools if you have not done so already. Bing "owns" the Yahoo search results as they have a 10yr contract with Yahoo. After you register your site, upload a sitemap. You can also manually upload up to 10 URLs a day, and 50 a month. I would suggest adding your home page and your main category pages at first, then follow up with your most important pages.

Understand Bing is a different search engine. They are much choosier about content and they may not index all the pages Google will. Also, do not expect your rankings in Google and Bing to be the same. They are two independent companies who have their own methods of determining search results.

I'm no expert but I will start answering some of these. Anyone else feel free to make corrections or answer the ones I have not.

1. I am also an seo noob and after 2 months here is how i stand54%-rank 4 (2.5 months)63%-rank 20 (.75 months)73%-rank 25 (.75 months)i would say try a varied strategy short, medium, and long term goals. You never really know how the search engines will see your efforts.

2. On page optimization is the structure of your site/pages and how the page is well.... optimized for certain keywords. Things like load times are may have a minimal effect on your rankings but this doesn't really have anything to do with onsite optimization.

3. Self-cannibalization means you may have multiple pages competing for the same keywords. For instance If you have your home page pointing a link to your blog and to your resource page using the same anchor text, they are in direct competition for that term. When the google bot crawls your website it follows links around to find pages and when presented with, lets say 2 pages with the same target keywords, it will determine (instead of you dictating) which is more relevant. So to optimize the site correctly fix your links so that pages do not compete with each other for keywords.

4. Lables = keywords or tags. They categorize your posts according to certain words you want to associate with the post. Do they help directly with SEO, probably not but they can help your readers identify posts with certain words and find other related posts.

5. <img alt= put something relevant or descriptive to the image you are posting" src= something.jpg">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_attribute : Google doesn't read Images unless you put a description, I wouldn't stuff keywords in there but if your keyword describes the image then do it.

6. Which ever should be fine. From what I understand Google bot does not read images unless you give them alt text. So as long as your readers can view the images you should not have any problems.

7. You can start building links whenever, just make sure you don't go too crazy with the link velocity (rate at which you build links). Start off slow and build your way up. Is there a right amount of links I think this is debatable. I personally think as long as they are high quality you wont have issues as long as one day 1000 links don't just pop up pointing to one page with all exact match anchor text you'll be ok.

8. People say the web 2.0 links have been devalued because of things like link wheels. Google doesn't like duplicate content so it wouldn't be best practice, but they do get indexed and they do tend to carry high domain authority and can build up page rank. All I can say for sure is that my web 2.0 links show up in my Google Web Master tools so I continue to do them at a moderate rate.

9. It is a situationall thing. It depends on the site

10. I would do what is most natural. If you have good content, links will go to multiple places on your site.

11. This is spam. Google's recent update penalizes for spam commenting. I wouldn't do it too much or at all.

12. I don't think that has any SEO value.

13. It will not hurt if you have a well written Robot.txt file and sitemap. If you want to block specific pages you can do so in google webmaster tools.

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